Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How to Be an Antiracist, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism vs. Antiracism
Activism and Social Transformation
Intersectionality
The History of Racist Ideas and Policies
Summary
Analysis
Gender racism is the policies and supporting ideas that create inequity among people of different race-genders (groups defined by both race and gender, like Black women). Gender antiracism, on the other hand, leads to equity among race-genders.
Talking about racism in a vacuum—without mentioning the other forces that affect people’s lives, like sexism, classism, and homophobia—would mean ignoring the experiences and needs of most people of color. This is why Kendi dedicates this chapter to talking about how racism specifically affects people of different genders.
Themes
Kendi remembers Kaila and Yaba, the most brilliant, courageous, and respected students in his doctoral program. When he started his PhD, Kendi was sexist and homophobic. He didn’t learn it from his parents, but rather because it was the cultural norm.
Just like racism, Kendi learned sexism and homophobia from society’s dominant views, so he had to take active steps to unlearn them if he wanted to help create a more equitable world. Now, he has learned to express his respect for Kaila and Yaba without letting sexist assumptions get in his way.
Themes
In the 1960s, worried about “broken” Black families headed by single mothers, Black community leaders tried to make Black fathers dominant in their families. In the process, they disempowered and controlled Black women—all the while declaring that Black men, not Black women, were the real victims of racism. Similarly, many of the era’s Black political movements were explicitly patriarchal—Kendi’s father never joined the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam because he saw them mistreat women. But he and Kendi’s mom still rallied against Black single motherhood, without questioning their assumptions about what makes a family function. To explain the growing percentage of babies born to Black single parents, most Americans blamed welfare, poverty, and moral degradation. But in reality, this statistic just reflected the fact that married Black women were having fewer children than before.
Racist narratives about Black mothers, as well as the male-centered agendas of Black nationalist movements, show that Black women experience racism in a distinct way that can’t be separated from their experiences of sexism. It’s too simplistic to say that they simply face racism (like Black men) and sexism (like white women). Rather, these two forces constantly work together. In fact, Black liberation movements put themselves at a huge disadvantage by not taking deliberate steps to include women, as this alienates half of their possible supporters. These movements’ racist-sexist ideas were attempts to blame apparent inequities on people themselves.
Themes
Still, Kendi’s parents were feminists. At their wedding rehearsal, his mother refused to repeat the vow, “wives [should] obey your husbands,” and his father proposed the more equal vow that they would “submit one to another.” His mom attended Black feminist discussion groups, which were growing rapidly in this era. Activists like Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, and the women of the Combahee River Collective drew attention to Black women’s experiences.
Black feminist movements like the one Kendi’s mother joined were attempting to correct the problems with mainstream feminist and antiracist movements. They were not trying to exclude Black men and white women from their political movements. Rather, they wanted to create a space that centered Black women, in order to help make feminist and antiracist movements more inclusive overall.
Themes
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For Black women, racism and sexism intertwine to create gendered racism. Kimberlé Crenshaw developed the concept of “intersectionality” to explain why antiracist movements must also fight sexism, and vice versa. Kendi offers some examples of gendered racism: for instance, eugenicist doctors sterilized hundreds of thousands of Black women in the 20th century. Today, Black and Latinx women earn less than any other race-gender. American culture also idealizes “weak White women” as the ideal of femininity. At the same time, it portrays Black men as either dangerous criminals (if they are strong and assertive) or insufficiently masculine.
Because everybody lives at the “intersection” of multiple identities (like race and gender), people’s experiences are not fully reducible to any of those identities alone. By taking this into account, social movements can support people holistically rather than just supporting one dimension of them. This makes movements more successful and helps them link up with movements aimed at other forms of oppression.
Themes
Kendi quotes Kimberlé Crenshaw’s call for feminism and antiracism to address the intersections of gender and race. Black women built an activist movement around intersectionality and made it possible for everyone belonging to multiple groups to do the same.
Based on Crenshaw’s vision of intersectionality, Kendi shows that antiracist movements must recognize and fight all forms of inequity in order to truly be effective and inclusive. In fact, he envisions a web of interlaced movements that all center different kinds of experiences and specifically focus on fighting for different kinds of equity.
Themes
